Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisThis is a book of full-length interviews with the poets Karen Mac Cormack, Caroline Bergvall, Jennifer Moxley and Andrea Brady carried out between 2008 and 2009 in the UK and USA by Scott Thurston. During the course of these conversations, the poets explore a huge range of topics likely to interest anyone concerned with the state of innovative poetry today. Each interview considers the complete oeuvre of each writer and includes detailed engagements with selected texts as well as unfolding themes such as the role of innovation, the politics of poetry and reflections on lyric and autobiography. Each interview is footnoted and there is an extensive bibliography.

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Book SynopsisThese essays cover the range of George Oppen's poetry and the ways it has been read at all stages of his career, from his overtly Objectivist roots through his abandonment of poetry for political activism in the thirties to his renewed poetic output after the 1950s.

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Book SynopsisThis book is concerned with the complex and uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry and poetics. Dealing with such major figures as Lorca, Rilke, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Niedecker, Duncan and Oppen and of more contemporary poets and poetry in the modernist and post-modernist lineage of Pound and Williams, the essays explore the work of these poets to see how it embodies our contemporary skepticism concerning language, representation and reality, showing that even as the poems depict or create values, they appear to be haunted by the possibility of inadequacy. Thus one of the book's major themes concerns how contemporary poets embody uncertainties, yet manage, in virtually the same breath, in the same line or stanza, to articulate both affirmation and doubt. Questions of form and meaning are discussed in the essays covering individual poets and their poems as well as in those which deal with contemporary avant garde movements, Jewish and post-Holocaust poetry, poetics and considerations of the act of writing itself. As well, these essays try to say something about the literary environment of contemporary poetry.Poetry today is, for the most part, inflected by the American experimentalism of Walt Whitman, the "make it new" of innovators such as Pound and Williams and by infusions of European dada and surrealism into the poetic psyche. More recently, in avant-garde poetic movements, as in contemporary criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist thought have had much influence. These availabilities, this book hopes to show, have produced an unparalleled richness of poetry and thought about poetry, offering not only a reflection of our uneasiness but also an active shaping force which, through the power of poetic language, provides the hope of meaning for both history and experience.

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Book Synopsis"This book is probably best described as a collective autobiography. With few exceptions the contributing poets write about their origins and influences and how they became involved in poetry. My main objective is to present the spirit of a brief era which, in retrospect, was exceptional in its momentum towards the democratisation and dissemination of poetry. The era or "cusp" I'm concentrating on is between World War II and the advent of the World Wide Web. Already extraordinary in its social, political and cultural upheaval, it seems even more heightened when set against the technological transformation which has since been unleashed."-from Geraldine Monk's introduction to this volume

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Book SynopsisWhen Bernard Spencer died in September 1963, he left behind two collections of poetry and a volume of collaborative translations from George Seferis. The second of these collections, With Luck Lasting, has proved aptly entitled with the publications of a Collected Poems (1965) edited by Alan Ross, an enlarged edition from 1981 edited by Roger Bowen, and a Complete Poetry, Translations & Selected Prose (2011) edited by Peter Robinson. With Bernard Spencer: Essays on his Poetry & Life, Robinson now offers the first collection of writings dedicated to the poet. Coming out of a 2009 centenary conference at Special Collections in the University of Reading, where his archive is housed, these essays cover a great many aspects of Spencer's poetry, translations, and his relations with contemporary writers. The volume also contains an updated bibliography of primary and secondary materials, and forms an invaluable aid to approaching this distinctive voice in mid-twentieth-century poetry.

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Book SynopsisWhen in his seventieth year Roy Fisher published Interviews Through Time (2000), he added and Selected Prose, which meant in effect three pieces: 'Antebiography', 'Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher' and 'Talks for Words'. The enlarged second edition of Interviews Through Time (2013), a volume of interviews only, made it possible for those three pieces to join many others in this first substantial gathering of Roy Fisher's occasional prose writings. An Easily Bewildered Child: Occasional Prose 1963-2013 brings together all his rare autobiographical sketches, the memoirs of his life as a jazz pianist, his tributes to musicians, writers, and painters of various kinds, a number of his book reviews, and comments on classic forebears such as John Cowper Powys, Ezra Pound, the Black Mountain poets, and Basil Bunting. All of these writings, as Fisher notes, 'owe their origins to commissions, suggestions or various forms of pressure from friends'. Together they provide a unique guide to the complex sources and influences on such distinctive works such as City, The Ship's Orchestra, and A Furnace as well as Fisher's oeuvre of individual poems. As Peter Robinson notes in his editor's Introduction, these writings in their various ways provide 'essential aids to those ramblers' who 'choose to stray' among the poetry and imaginative prose of a key contemporary English poet.Table of ContentsAuthor Note Introduction Note on the Text I. Antebiography Meanwhile Antebiography Brum Born Talks for Words The Morden Tower My Trip to Brighton Six Towns Memoir of Richard Caddel At the Funeral of Stuart Mills License My Roving Hands II. Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher Poet on Writing Note on The Cut Pages Roy Fisher writes - Handsworth Compulsions Preface to A Furnace Birmingham's What I Think With: Programme Note Reply to Paul Lester Inside A Various Art Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher III. On Poets and Others Death by Adjectives David Prentice The Green Fuse Mary Fitton's Foreshores On John Cowper Powys' Letters Thomas Campion On a Study of Dada On Ezra Pound Debt to Mr Bunting At a Tangent On a Study of Robert Creeley On Kenneth Rexroth's An Autobiographical Novel Gael Turnbull Foreword to Spleen (Nicholas Moore/Baudelaire) Introduction to Jeff Nuttall's Selected Poems Concerning Joseph Brodsky Coat Hanger A Checklist of Roy Fisher's Occasional Prose by Derek Slade

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Book SynopsisIn 1993, say, the term Performance Writing, if used at all, suggested simply writing for performance. By 2011, when the author of this collection became the first Professor of Performance Writing, it had attained a much wider-indeed international-currency in discussions of contemporary writing, and had entered the curriculum of a range of courses well beyond its intense first conceptual and pedagogic development at the adventurous Dartington College of Arts. The task-and indeed the task of many of these essays-had been to fill out the terms for an approach to writing that looked beyond and beside literature for its sources, references and material practices. These other frames included: the rapid changes taking place within the technologies for producing, circulating and receiving text; a 'turn to writing' within other cultural practices, especially perhaps its integral presence within visual and sonic culture; the increasing textuality of the shared environment (words in public places, for example); and finally, philosophical preoccupations with the idea of performativity and its entailment with language.

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Book SynopsisThis companion volume to On Performance Writing, with implicated readings, brings together most of the essays-taking a deliberately broad view of that term so as to include, for example, two single-page visual essays and one sonnet-on the reading and writing of poetry by the poet and teacher, John Hall. The collection is in two parts. The first, starting with the often cited 'Writing and Not Writing', takes on, in the spirit of poetics, current issues for the category of poetry, considered both formally and contextually, and with particular interest in reading as a practice in which poems are actions and events rather than capturable things. The longer second part develops these thoughts through readings of specific, mostly contemporary, poems: the poets whose work is read are not intended to represent a proposed new canon. They have all, though, contributed significantly to a growing body of work in recent decades that brings together the social and bodily pleasures (and displeasures) of poetry with the ethical demands of truthfulness. They include Andrea Brady, Kelvin Corcoran, Allen Fisher, Harry Guest, Lee Harwood, Peter Hughes, John James, Nicholas Johnson, R.F. Langley, Karen Mac Cormack, Peter Middleton, Geraldine Monk, Alice Notley, Douglas Oliver, F.T. Prince, J.H. Prynne, John Riley, Peter Riley and John Wieners.

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Book SynopsisIn Spite of All is a memoir by a Portuguese poet, of another Portuguese poet: Alberto de Lacerda, an almost legendary figure in expatriate circles. Lacerda lived for many years in London, with sojourns also in Boston and in Austin, Texas, when lectureships took him away, but he always returned to his adopted city. A fine poet, Lacerda also had a talent for friendship, which is amply borne out by Luis Amorim de Sous'a touching memoir of his friend.

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Book SynopsisThis volume contains the remarkable PhD thesis submitted by Crozier in 1972, and for which his external examiner was J.H. Prynne-whose comments on the thesis are also included here, as an afterword. "My intention in writing this thesis has been to cast some light on the prima facie case that free verse, in abandoning the exercise of metre, has abandoned that principle of restraint upon which the creation of artistic form depends. This point of view contrasts with a general contention on the part of the exponents of free verse that their works possess form which is not only unique but which also bears an immediate relation to the significance of the work, a relationship felt to be 'musical', although not in any directly analogical sense."Table of ContentsIntroduction by Ian BrintonChapter 1: Summary & Introduction: Critical Reservations about "Modern" or Experimental Poetry Chapter 2: The Concept of Metre and the Relation of Prosody to MeaningChapter 3: Prose and Speech as Criteria for the Organisation of Poetic DiscourseChapter 4: The Influence of Humanist Notions of Organisation on Sixteenth Century PoeticsChapter 5: The Harmony of the World and the Harmony of Verse: an Idea in DegradationChapter 6: Sound and Sense: the Direct Action of Poetic Rhythm on the Passions and the Theory of ExpressionChapter 7: Natural Rhythmic Standards and the Demand for Prosodic VarietyChapter 8: Conclusion: Free Verse and the Natural Restraints of LanguageReport by J.H. Prynne

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Book SynopsisFirst published posthumously in 1978 by Manchester University Press, this volume turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism. The book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) defence of "all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices which make poetry different from prose." According to the author, such devices are responsible for poetry's most significant effect-not pleasure or ornament or some kind of special expressivity, but the production of "alternative imaginary orders."

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Book SynopsisPanegyric poetry, in both Arabic and Persian, was one of the most important genres of literature in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. Jocelyn Sharlet argues that panegyric poetry is important not only because it provides a commentary on society and culture in the medieval Middle East, but also because panegyric writing was one of the key means for individuals to gain social mobility and standing during this period. This is particularly so within the context of patronage, a central feature of social order during these times. Sharlet places the medieval Arabic and Persian panegyric firmly within its cultural context, and identifies it as a crucial way of gaining entry to and movement within this patronage network. This is an important contribution to the fields of pre-modern Middle Eastern and Central Asian literature and culture.Trade Review'This is a work of very wide, very thorough and very impressive scholarship. Dr. Sharlet's use of primary sources is exemplary in its scope and in its ability to identify what is apposite to illustrate a given argument. Work on praise poetry is the great lacuna of modern scholarship on Middle Eastern medieval verse; it is an absolutely crucial genre (and indeed much of the rhetoric of other poetic genres in these cultures demonstrably derives from the rhetoric of praise poetry), and yet there are virtually no good discussions of what poets in this genre did, or how and why they did it. Dr. Sharlet's book is easily the most important contribution to our understanding of this important genre that I am aware of.' - Dick Davis, Chair and Professor of Persian, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University; 'Unlike many of her predecessors, who have studied patronage in the context of panegyric poetry or in passing as part of their analysis of narrative texts, in this book Sharlet undertakes to dissect the interplay of risk and success as the stuff not only of sponsored literature within a literary patronage system, but also as the instantiation of a form of social order. This is an ambitious, original, and important text - one that will set the bar higher for all who work in medieval Arabic and Persian literature.' - Margaret Larkin, Professor of Arabic Literature, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, BerkeleyTable of ContentsIntroduction Chapter 1: The Rhetoric of Patronage: Building Possibilities Chapter 2: Panegyric Discourse: Elaborating on Possibilities Chapter 3: Awareness of Patronage Relationships in Panegyric Poetry Chapter 4: Connections of Interaction Chapter 5: Uncertainty and Flexibility in Patronage Chapter 6: Flexibility and Social Mobility in Patronage

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Book SynopsisJohn Manson's collection of letters to MacDiarmid, or to Christopher Grieve, or to Hugh or Chris or Christie or Hughie, is a major work. It is the fruit of a lifetime of dedicated scholarly research, meticulous, self-effacing study in libraries, most deeply in the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library, and follows his initial co-editorship with David Craig of the first Penguin paperback edition of MacDiarmid's Selected Poems (1970), and his later co-editorship of The Revolutionary Art of the Future: Rediscovered Poems, with Dorian Grieve and Alan Riach (2003). 'He is a fine poet and translator himself, and his small-press publications are to be sought out and read closely. However, this is a monumental achievement: a collection so rich in diversity, covering historical epochs, strata of human character, social engagement, political motivation and accomplishment, that it will take some time before its impact and value really sinks in and embeds itself in modern literary and political culture - especially in Scotland!' - from the Introduction by Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow.Trade Review'[A] magisterial selection by John Manson - one of the most assiduous and effective labourers in the MacDiarmid vineyard for no less than seven decades. The printed letters are accompanied by detailed and informative annotations, and the book is further enlivened by more than thirty period photographs and other reproductions. [It] offers testimony to the extraordinary breadth of MacDiarmid's intellectual circle.' Professor Patrick Crotty, University of Aberdeen 'Manson's industry, and his enthusiasm for MacDiarmid, are overwhelming. Not for the first time, [he] has unearthed material that alters our view of his hero.' Brian Smith, The New Shetlander, Voar Issue 2012. 'This is a fascinating book, one to keep within reach for stimulation or escape from the troubles of the day.' Paul Henderson Scott, Scots Independent newspaper, March 2012. 'Reading this meticulously researched collection of hundreds of letters .. opens a window on a whole period of ideological struggle for national recognition, socialism and opposition to imperialism and war.' Jean Turner, Morning Star, January 2012Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. Hugh MacDiarmid: Put it to the Touch - An Introduction to Dear Grieve by Alan Riach. List of Abbreviations. Illustrations. Titles of Books Frequently Cited. Hugh MacDiarmid's Addresses. Note on the Text. The Letters - The 1920s; The 1930s; The 1940s; The 1950s; The 1960s; The 1970s. Letters to Hugh MacDiarmid which have previously appeared in print. Biographical List of Correspondents. Index

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Book SynopsisThe late Annemarie Schimmel drew exhaustively on an enourmous range of sources both ancient and modern to create this thorough survey of a unique body of literature. Travelling from continent to continent and across the centuries, this story of Islamic poetry encompasses a wide spectrum of traditions and cultures, from Arabic religious verse to the ecstasies of the persian Sufis and the popular folk poetry of India and Pakistan.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. Flowers of the Desert: The Development of Arabic Mystical Poetry 2. Tiny Mirros of Divine Beauty: Classical persian Mystical Poetry 3. Sun Triumphal - Love Triumphant: Maulana Rumi and the Metaphors of Love 4. The Voice of Love: Mystical poetry in the Vernaculars 5. God's Beloved and Intercessor for Man: Poetry in Honor of the Prophet Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography Notes Bibliography Index of Selected Quotations Index of Proper Names Index of Technical Terms

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Book SynopsisThe Angel of History bears witness to the moral disasters of our times: war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. The book is a meditation on memory – how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems are fragmented, discordant, reflecting the effects of such experience, but forming a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations we make to survive what is unsurvivable. It is divided into five sections dealing with the atrocities of war in France, Japan and Germany as well as Carolyn Forché's own experiences in Beirut and El Salvador. The title figure, the Angel of History – a figure imagined by Walter Benjamin – can record the miseries of humanity yet is unable either to prevent these miseries from happening or from suffering from the pain associated with them. Kevin Walker, in the Detroit Free Press, called the book 'a meditation on destruction, survival and memory'. Don Bogen, in The Nation, saw this as a logical development, since Forché’s work with her poetry of witness anthology Against Forgetting was 'instrumental in moving her poetry beyond the politics of personal encounter. The Angel of History is rather an extended poetic mediation on the broader contexts – historical, aesthetic, philosophical – which include [the 20th]…century’s atrocities,' wrote Bogen. And Steven Ratiner, reviewing the work for the Christian Science Monitor, called it one that 'addresses the terror and inhumanity that have become standard elements in the twentieth-century political landscape – and yet affirms as well the even greater reservoir of the human spirit'.Trade Review"The "Angel of History" is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half century of atrocities that has yet been written in English."-- Calvin Bedient, "The Threepenny Review""The poignant "cri de couer" of this singular work most affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time."-- Robert Creeley"I don't think I have ever come across a poem of such length that is nevertheless so beautifully transparent and haunting."-- James Merrill"A dark, richly textured, complicated work...["The Angel of History"] is that great rarity, an altogether new thing."-- Liz Rosenberg, "Boston Globe""Poetry of consummate beauty...reminiscent of Eliot's 'The Waste Land.'"-- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

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Book SynopsisIn the wake of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey", poets of the seventh and sixth centuries BC composed epics which covered other parts of the Trojan War story or different areas of Greek mythology. Quotations from them and other testimonies as to their content survive in later authors and the evidence thus assembled allows us to reconstruct something of the poems' contents. Collectively these poems came to be known by Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria as 'The Epic Cycle'. With their often grotesque and fantastic tales, the cyclic poems were an important source for later writers of epic. Yet they also present a wealth of fascinating mythological details in their own right and provide absorbing variation on the traditional themes presented in Homer. Why are certain themes frequently used, while others are neglected in various poems? Such considerations enhance an overall appreciation of epic theme and outlook. This short study provides an introduction to the Cycle for students and scholars of Greek epic, and of Classical civilisation and mythology more generally. All quotations are translated, making the material accessible to those with little or no Greek.

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Book SynopsisThis edition, originally published in 1953 in the admirable Methuen Classical Texts series, has been in print ever since. It's longevity is deserved; for it remains a very fine edition, manageable at different levels of attainment. Maguinness had chiefly in mind students at sixth-form or early university level but, for the benefit of less practised students taking GCSE or in their second year of Latin bugun at University, he wisely included a Vocabulary (marked with syllable lengths to tie in with his very useful section on scansion and reading aloud) and a considerable amount of fairly elementary linguistic matter in the Notes. The Introduction gives an outline of the background knowledge needed by a beginner in Virgilian studies. For a succinct and always level-headed approach to the "Aeneid", this remains a splendid edition - one for which more advanced Virgilians still have every reason to be thankful; and Book XII gives an excellent flavour of the whole epic and the meaning of its constantly enigmatic closure.Table of ContentsIntroduction I. The Life And Works Of Virgil II. The Epic Tradition And The Aeneid III. Virgil's Poetry And The Modern Reader I IV. The Metre Of Virgil Bibliography Text Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA.D.P. Briggs is Professor Emeritus, University of Birmingham, and Senior Research Fellow, University of Bristol, UK. He was awarded the Pushkin Medal 'for distinguished writing about Pushkin in the English Language', and a second Pushkin Medal was awarded 'for an outstanding contribution to the Pushkin bicentennial celebration'. His many books include Alexander Pushkin: a Critical Study, (1991); Eugene Onegin, Landmarks of World Literature (1992), and as editor Alexander Pushkin (1997) and translator Eugene Onegin (1995).

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Book SynopsisThe Spanish ballad is well documented from the 16th to the 20th century in substantial, though declining, oral sources, chiefly in Castilian but also in Judeo-Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. The 70 ballads in this volume are taken from 16th-century printed sources, from the period when the ballad of tradition, sung and orally transmitted, was polished for printing by poets, musicians and editors to meet the taste of the times. There is a general introduction, notes prefacing each group, and others about origins, background, variants, modern oral version, English translations, following each ballad, a bibliography and a glossary of difficult terms. The book is part of the "BCP Spanish Texts" series, designed to meet the needs of the fast-growing A-Level and undergraduate markets for texts in the Spanish language. Each text comes with English notes and vocabulary, and with an introduction by an editor with an expert knowledge both of the work and of the literary and cultural context in which it was produced.

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Book SynopsisEmpedocles (c. 494-434 B.C.) achieved legendary status as a philosopher, scientist, healer, poet and orator. He made important contributions to the developments of European thought with his theory of the four elements, his detailed work on perception, respiration and cognition, and his understanding in the kinship in structure and form of the hierarchy of living creatures. Now available in paperback, this is the first full-scale edition this century of the extant fragments, which are grouped into two poems -- Physics and Katharmoi. In her Introduction, Professor Wright surveys the evidence for Empedocles’ life and writings, and gives a clear account of the main lines of thought within a framework common to the poems. The fragments are presented in their contexts in a new ordering with full critical apparatus; they are followed by a translation and commentary on each, in which the linguistic, philosophical and scientific questions relevant to the text are examined. The Indexes cover sources, passages cited and subject matter, as well as a comprehensive concordance of Empedocles’ vocabulary. This new in paperback edition has been updated with a bibliographic commentary covering the last fifteen years of Empedoclean scholarship, and is part of the Classic Latin and Greek texts series.Trade ReviewUndergraduates will find this book an invaluable guide through the perplexing terrain of Empedocles’ language and thought. Scholars too will welcome it. -- Classical ReviewPacked with fresh suggestions and arguments which constitute a major contribution to a difficult and much discussed topic. -- Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsI. INTRODUCTION 1. Life and Writings Dating Empedoc1es' Life Politics, Rhetoric, and Medicine The Manner ofEmpedocles' Death Works Attributed to Empedocles 2. Physics Earth, Air, Fire, and Water Love and Strife Mixing and Separating The Plan of the Physics Monsters and Men 3. Katharmoi and Physics Common Ground Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility Empedocles as Daimon 4. The Allocation of the Fragments 5. The Titles of the Poems 6. Concordance of the Ordering of the Fragments II. TEXT 7. llEPI «l»YEEill: (fragments 1-101) 8. KA9APMOI (fragments 102-133) 9. Addenda (fragments 134-152) III. TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY 10. Physics 11. Katharmoi 12. Addenda Bibliography Bibliographical AfterWord Additional Bibliography Index Fontium Index Verborum Index Locorum Index Nominum et Rerum

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Book SynopsisLucretius offers his readers a complete guide to happiness and a total tour of the universe. Even a few selections from his poetry reveal the radical freethinker at his very best. This book draws on the latest research into the text and interpretation of Lucretius. It is aimed at the sixth-former or undergraduate who seeks a helpful introduction to the poem; little background knowledge of Latin literature will be assumed. The commentary elucidates both the poetic artistry and philosophical content.Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Summary Metre Select Bibliography Text Commentary Book One Book Two Book Three Book Four Book Five Book Six

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Book SynopsisThis is the first volume of R. Deryck Williams' classic edition of the Aeneid, covering books I-VI. It includes the Latin text, with English introduction, an extensive commentary and notes by this renowned Virgilian scholar. Designed for upper school and university students, the commentary discusses the life and works of Virgil, the legend of Aeneas, structure and themes and Virgil’s hexameter. It interprets the poetic methods and intentions of the Aeneid, and explains not only what Virgil says, but how he says it and why he says it in the particular way which he chooses. Williams considers the limitations and similarities of diction from English poets - particularly Spenser and Milton - in order to illuminate the literary impact of the Virgilian passage. Williams' aim was to be "concise rather than omissive" and his notes remain an example of clarity and good sense for any student approaching the first half of the Aeneid in whole or in part.Table of ContentsPreface Introduction 1 Life and works of Virgil 2 Virgil and Augustus 3 The legend of Aeneas 4 Sources of the Aeneid 5 Synopsis of the Aeneid 6 Structure and themes 7 Virgil’s hexameter 8 The manuscripts of the Aeneid and the ancient commentators 9 Differences of text between this edition and Mynors and Hirtzel 10 Bibliography TEXT Commentary Index to the notes English-Russian vocabulary Index of prepositions Index of Russian words and morphemes Index of grammatical subjects

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Book SynopsisThis is the second volume of R. Deryck Williams' classic edition of the Aeneid, covering books VII and XII. It includes the Latin text, with English introduction, an extensive commentary and notes by this renowned Virgilian scholar. Designed for upper school and university students, the commentary interprets the poetic methods and intentions of the Aeneid, and explains not only what Virgil says, but how he says it and why he says it in the particular way which he chooses. The outstanding and long-lived ‘red Macmillan’ series of editions survived on the basis of T. E. Page’s perceptive and exemplary editions of Virgil, dating from the closing decade of the nineteenth century. In the early 1970s, replacement editions were prepared by the outstanding Virgilian scholar R.D. Williams, to take account of more modern approaches to Virgil and of the needs of new generations of upper school and university students. The scale of the edition required brevity and immediate relevance to the text but Williams achieved his aim of being ‘concise rather than omissive’ and his notes remain an example of clarity and good sense for any student approaching the second half of the Aeneid in whole or in part.Table of ContentsAuthor’s Note Preface Introduction 1. Life and works of Virgil 2. Virgil and Augustus 3. The legend of Aeneas 4. Sources of the Aeneid 5. Synopsis of the Aeneid 6. Structure and themes 7. Virgil’s hexameter 8. The manuscripts of the Aeneid and the ancient commentators 9. Differences of text between this edition and Mynors and Hirtzel 10. Bibliography Text Commentary Index to the notes

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Book SynopsisMedicine, zoology, botany and mineralogy are the themes of Nicander's two extant poems of the Hellenistic period - "Theriaca" and "Alexipharmaca". Fragments of other poems also survive, including some fairly substantial pieces of his "Georgica". His didactic poetry, along with that of his approximate contemporary Aratus, had some influence on later poets, notably Virgil and Ovid. This fully annotated English translation of Nicander's work was first published in 1953.

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Book SynopsisJorge Guillen belongs to a brilliant cluster of Spanish poets, a generation once defined by Salinas, one of its members, as "born under a lyrical star". Towards the end of his life Guillen's most famous work "Cantico" - the fruit of some 30 years of labour - was recognized as a masterpiece and stands alongside the poetical works of Lorca, Alberti and Cernuda. Most usefully translated as a hymn or song of praise, "Cantico" is an antidote to today's world of doubts, fears, conflicts and seductive philosophies of despair. The attitude to life it holds out to its readers is summed up in the epitaph on Guillen's tomb in the English cemetery in Malaga: "Aqui yace un enamorado de la vida" ("Here lies a lover of life").

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Book SynopsisThe aim of this title is to provide a reference work for both students and teachers on every kind of Latin metre from the early "saturnian" to medieval accentual verse. The information provided aims to be in its simplest form to make the subject more accessible and jargon free.

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Book Synopsis"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" stand at the very beginning of Greek literature. Much has been written about their origins and authorship, but Jasper Griffin, although he touches briefly on those questions, is here concerned with the ideas of the poems, which have had such an incalculable influence on the ideas of the West. He shows that each of the two epics has its own coherent and suggestive view of the world and of man's place in it.Trade Review'...a brilliant little introduction.' The Times 'Mr. Griffin brings English scholarship up to date by bringing it firmly back to Homer.' London Review of Books

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Book SynopsisThis volume is part of a series of key monographs on topics central to the study of the classical world. It looks at Theocritus as both a source for Vergil and later writers and as a significant poet in his own right. It gives an insight into this classical author which may prove relevant not only for classicists but also for all studying the pastoral tradition in literature.Trade Review'Should be required reading for anyone attempting to deal with the pastoral tradition.' Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 'Professor Rosenmeyer's full-length study treats Theocritus not merely as a source for Vergil and later writers but as a poet - a significantly worthy poet - in his own right. This is a fully documented literary study of Theocritus that cannot help but provide the student with deep insight and steady appreciation of a notable Hellenistic author and a persistent literary genre.' Classical Outlook

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Book SynopsisJohn Keats began writing at the age of 18, and by the time he died, seven years later in 1821, he had produced a substantial number of poems. This collection contains his work - his narratives, sonnets of discovery and his six odes - and culminates in "To Autumn".

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Book SynopsisFor centuries women have written about love with passion, humour, frustration and despair; but never before have their voices come together as in this exhilarating and timeless compendium. Here are love poems in all their true, subversive drama, delicately arranged according to a balance of moods and modes: of argument and lyric, joke and passionate utterance, rejection, rage and ecstacy. Poets, well-known and obscure, ancient and modern - from Sappho to Akhamotova,Patti Smith to Selima Hill, Sylvia Plath to Alice Walker - all challenge the traditional perception of women as muse and object of desire, and magnificently transcend it.Trade ReviewFeisty selection of anthems with attitude ... a noisy throng of impressively dissimilar voices ... A book to treasure * IRISH TIMES *An exhilarating collection with women across the centuries writing about love, with wit, passion, frustration, rage and ecstacy. * WOMAN'S JOURNAL *

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Book SynopsisR.F. Langley's 'Collected Poems' (Carcanet, 2000) was one of the poetic highlights of recent times, showing a sometimes sceptical public that a contemporary poet could still engage with the shades of Modernism and produce fascinating and original work. Throughout his life, the author has been maintaining a journal, which is part diary, part autobiography and part commonplace book; some extracts from these fascinating volumes have been appearing in 'P N Review' since 2002. This book offers a number of selections, ranging in time from 1970 to 2005, which will give admirers of his poetry a clearer idea of the author's other writings, which run in parallel with his poetry and sometimes provide the underpinnings for it.

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Book SynopsisA collection of essays based on the conference of the same name held at the Univeristy of Plymouth in April 2007. Contributors are Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten; Andrea Brady, Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Richard Kerridge, Peter Middleton, William Rowe, Robert Sheppard; Helene Aji, Andrew Browne, Matt Chambers, Brendan Cooper, Ian Davidson, Carrie Etter, Kit Fryatt, Piers Hugill, Michael Kindellan, Greg Lainsbury, Catherine Martin, Will Montgomery, Eva Mueller-Zettelman, Susan Nurmi-Schomers, Christopher Orchard, Robin Peel, Kathy-Ann Tan, Philip Terry and Scott Thurston.

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Book SynopsisThe book aims to be the most useful and engaging introduction to the medieval Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti in English.

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